Chiara Carter
Youths swathed in Palestinian scarves were an image of the anti-apartheid revolt on the Cape Flats during the 1980s; the same garb is associated today with radical Muslims, notably People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) supporters.
During the 1980s, many Cape Town Muslim clergy were more politicised than their counterparts in other parts of the country.
But the 1994 elections saw many progressive leaders enter the government under the banner of the African National Congress. They are politicians who are Muslim rather than Muslims in government.
An attempt to gain representation for Muslims in Parliament failed. Neither of the two Muslim parties that contested the 1994 elections won sufficient votes to gain a seat.
The University of Cape Town’s Abdulkader Tayob argues that developments in South Africa parallel post-independence experiences of other African countries with sizeable Muslim communities. There is a struggle over who represents the Muslim community at a national level.
Meanwhile, radical Islam has found fertile ground in the power vacuum. The Islamic Unity Convention – an umbrella body for more than 200 small Muslim organisations – was formed in 1994.
In 1995, radical theologian Achmat Cassiem became its chair and the convention is dominated by leaders of Qibla, the organisation he formed in 1978/79 to fight apartheid.
A former Robben Islander, Cassiem is widely credited with having a strong influence on the thinking of Islamic militants in South Africa. Cassiem asserts that politics cannot be separated from religion and Muslims have a duty to oppose an illegitimate state.
He argued strongly for a boycott of the 1994 elections, espousing a viewpoint shared by many radical groups around the world: “If democracy opposes Islam, then Islam opposes democracy.”
He also promised there would be an Islamic state in South Africa by the year 2000 – a bizarre notion given that Muslims make up a tiny proportion of the population and that not all would favour such a state.
The utterances of Cassiem and his adherents draw on a heady brew of modern Islamic thinking and symbols – unity, martyrdom and revolution.
There have been claims that Iran funded Qibla and its members received training in Libya and Pakistan. Qibla leaders are said to have links to Algerian extremists as well as the Hizbullah in Lebanon.
At home Qibla has links with the Revolutionary Watchdogs, a militant organisation heavily infiltrated by apartheid agents during the 1990s.
Organised into cells in the Western and Eastern Cape as well as KwaZulu-Natal, Qibla membership is thought to number a few hundred. However, its members have exerted a major influence on Pagad.
Pagad’s confrontational conduct and inflammatory rhetoric have attracted publicity, admiration and vilification.
While Pagad has branches elsewhere in the country, it is a Western Cape phenomenon and its emergence and continued existence cannot be explained only in terms of Muslim militancy. It is a product of the social, economic and political make-up of the Western Cape where crime, police inefficiency and a vicious battle for dominance of the drug trade are hallmarks of Cape Flats life.
That the gangsters and merchants themselves are often Muslim points to the danger of simplistic analyses, as does the the fact that many Pagad supporters are middle class, while many gangsters are working class.
Surveys indicated that some two-thirds of Muslims supported Pagad soon after its launch. But with its recent bad publicity, this figure is likely to have dropped and attendance at events is not a reliable indicator of support.
While Pagad loses support when it is linked to violent acts, it gains sympathy every time Muslims are discriminated against, such as being refused entrance to the Waterfront.
Pagad portrays itself as a community organisation opposed to crime. However, from the outset the organisation, now led by Abdusalam Ebrahim, had an implicit political goal – it marched on Parliament in May 1996 and has targeted Minister of Justice Dullah Omar from the outset.
It has also hit out at clergy, business figures, academics and journalists. More recently, it accused the security establishment of having a hidden agenda.
Two other more overtly political organisations, Muslims against Global Oppression and Muslims against Illegitimate Leaders, emerged from the shadows last year with a membership and rhetoric that overlapped with Pagad and Qibla.
Both are student-dominated and aim to provide channels for political aims, organising demonstrations against Zionism and imperialism, for example.
Several former Pan Africanist Congress and Azanian People’s Organisation soldiers are members of the local chapter of the international New Nation of Islam, or Al Murabitun, recently rocked by revelations at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that its former leader had been a Vlakplaas askari.
Rumours that South Africans were receiving military training in Sudan appear to be based on the existence of a grouping in the Eastern Cape, Talaai el Fateh, which is linked to the exiled Egyptian organisation Gama al Islamiya.
Many have scoffed at claims, apparently originating with Israeli intelligence, that there is also a local version of the Lebanese Hizbullah. Such claims fit in well with an international trend to demonise radical Islamic movements as the “fundamentalist” enemy in a new version of the Cold War.
Yet South Africa’s Muslim community is influenced by events abroad and a romanticisation of the international Islamic struggle.
Unease at the growth of American cultural and economic dominance, admiration for Libya and the early theocracy in Iran, and the formation of militias to fight in the Bosnian civil war have influenced local politics.
This fuels youthful idealism which, if not channelled constructively, might pose a threat to the state.
@Tempers rising against ZumaAnn Eveleth
Minister of Health Nkosazana Zuma’s refusal to treat HIV-positive pregnant mothers to reduce the transmission of the virus to their babies has sparked unprecedented protest in international Aids circles.
An international crisis meeting was held this week in a bid to cool rising tempers over the issue. International Aids Society president Mark Wainberg flew to South Africa last week to convince Zuma that the treatment was a cost-effective way of fighting the epidemic. The society also met South African and international scientists in Chicago on Monday in a bid to dampen growing calls for a boycott of the 13th World Aids Conference due to be held in Durban in July 2000.
Wainberg called on President Nelson Mandela, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel to “support Zuma in recognising that perinatal treatment is a cost-effective way forward, and in making funds available for this. South Africa must consider itself to be at war. Its number- one enemy … is not some neighbouring country threatening its borders. It is HIV.”
Wainberg said his meeting with Zuma left him “encouraged and confident” that new information would spark a shift in the South African position. He said his society and South African researchers agreed to oppose boycott efforts, but warned he would return to South Africa in April and “certainly if we don’t have positive signs by then, it may be time to consider another course of action”. This follows suggestions from some researchers that Zuma should be barred from participation in the conference if she failed to change the policy.
Local activists said they would “not rule out” a boycott. “The conference is still 18 months away, and it is too early to call for a boycott, but I wouldn’t rule out support from local researchers and activists if the government has not significantly shifted its position on mother-to-child transmissions and other Aids policy issues … by September,” said Aids Consortium representative Mark Heywood.
On Tuesday, however, the Ministry of Health turned its back on the most positive research findings yet to emerge on cost-effective means of reducing mother-to-child transmission.
In October, Zuma pulled the plug on a local pilot study of a four-week AZT treatment for pregnant women, claiming the government could not afford the R80-million annual cost of this treatment. Studies conducted in other countries suggested this treatment could reduce transmission by 51%. New preliminary findings of a study by UNAids released in Chicago this week suggest that a one-week treatment of mother and child, beginning at the start of labour, could reduce transmission by 37%.
The findings, based on clinical trials of 1 357 mainly breastfeeding women in South Africa, Uganda and Tanzania, suggest the cost of a national programme could drop by 50% to R40-million annually, or 0,2% of the R20-billion national health budget.
The treatment could still save the lives of more than 20 000 babies a year, based on a Department of Health antenatal survey in 1996. Babies born with HIV now represent about 20% of new infections in South Africa.
But Zuma’s representative, Vincent Hlongwane, said the government would not reconsider its decision not to fund the AZT programme. “What we are saying is that we don’t have the budget for it. That position has not changed. It has not been influenced by the research findings coming from Chicago or anywhere else,” he said.
Local Aids activists this week slammed the ministry’s response as “autocratic”, “extraordinary” and “ludicrous”. University of the Witwatersrand Aids Law Project attorney Fatima Hassan said it was “unacceptable that the government won’t seriously consider these results … We were under the impression that the government was waiting for the [UNAids study] results to decide on the intervention.”
The ministry’s hasty response runs counter to its ongoing efforts to gain preferential pricing for AZT and 3TC – the two drugs needed for the treatment – from the company that makes them. Glaxo Wellcome medical director Peter Moore would not comment on a projected price, but said he hoped to release a statement on the negotiations with the ministry soon.
The decision also flies in the face of Zuma’s promise last October that her department would “continuously evaluate the decision as new scientific information on cost-effective interventions appropriate to our situation in South Africa becomes available”.
Medical Research Council researcher Mark Lurie said the decision to cut the funding had “closed the door … to any possibility of introducing a national programme”.
Hlongwane said Zuma’s position was supported by the Cabinet, which was “fully briefed” on all HIV/Aids developments: “The Cabinet’s position is to rather use the money we have for prevention. The majority of South Africans do not have Aids now, but that could change if we don’t focus on prevention.”
National Association of People with Aids representative Mark Decker said the government was creating a “false division between prevention and treatment”.